Total world Wii sales close in on Xbox 360 tally

Nintendo's Wii is nearing the Xbox 360's cumulative sales total, despite the year-long availability advantage enjoyed by the Microsoft games consoles. New figures put the Wii at 10.10m units sold to date worldwide, just behind the 360's 10.32m.

The numbers come from new-to-us website VG Chartz, which claims to base its figures on over-the-counter sales data from a selection of retailers around the world, or when the latest numbers were taken. It doesn't say how many retailers it uses, or name them, but it claims its estimates are "very accurate projections of the latest console sell through figures worldwide".

Whether you take the numbers with a pinch of salt or not, they have the 360's 10.32m sales made up of 430,000 in Japan, 6,64m in the US and 3.25m everywhere else. The equivalent Wii numbers are 3.32m, 4.07m and 2.71m, respectively. Not bad, given that the Wii hit store shelves around a year after the Xbox 360 did.

And the PS3? VG Chartz puts it on 4.11m units, 1.08m in Japan, 1.78m in the US and 1.25m elsewhere.

All three compare poorly to the 46.83m DS handhelds the site reckons have been bought globally and the 22.37m PSPs consumers have acquired from Sony.